With the aggression of the US and NATO occupiers on October 7, 2001 in our homeland, it has been twelve years now that our country is facing war, destruction, and the killing of thousands of its innocent civilians. The US used the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as a pretext to change the regime in Afghanistan and pave the way for its long-term military presence in the region. For the first time in their history, Afghanistan’s people, who were tired and fed up from the crimes of the Jehadi pigs and the brutalities of the Taliban, did not react to an occupier force.

The US government and its allies promised our people democracy, but imposed upon them the most undemocratic, corrupt, and mafia government of our history; they spoke of ‘war on terror’ but brought the murderers and terrorists of the Northern Alliance, gun-lords and drug kingpins to power, and have now extended their hands in friendship to the Taliban; the US used human rights and women’s rights as an excuse, but Afghanistan still faces the worse kinds of human rights violations and horrifying catastrophes against its women; they promised our people liberation and freedom, but practically turned our country into a narco-state and the center of their longest-running criminal war.

From the very start, the democratic forces of Afghanistan and peace-loving elements of the world had recognized the US’s war in Afghanistan as part of its imperialist policies. They announced that that this superpower was only invading Afghanistan to compete with its emerging contenders and was cementing its military bases in the heart of Asia towards this purpose.

Twelve years of our country’s occupation proves the validity of this prediction. In these years, not only did the justice-seeking people of the US and world protest against the war, but a significant number of soldiers also stood up against their government’s inhumane and hypocritical policies, and started a vast and glorious anti-war movement.

The people of Afghanistan soon noticed the false nature of the US and NATO’s ‘war on terror’, when against their demand, the criminal Taliban terrorists were replaced with the misogynist terrorist gangs of the Northern Alliance. In addition to providing staunch support to the Jehadi and technocrat traitors, the US has taken the service of a group of intellectual sellouts, and have created a band of lackeys out of them by stuffing Dollars down their filthy throats. If in the past, being on the payroll of a foreign country was seen as treachery and disgrace, today this group has become so shameless and devoid of conscience that they proudly flaunt off their servitude to the US and other foreign intelligences. Karzai and those surrounding him, confessed, in an unseen blatant fashion, that they took bags of Dollars from the CIA, Vavak, MI6, RAW, ISI and others, and branded them as ‘useful’ so that their masters would continue pouring in money. The so-called Jehadi leaders have also tied themselves on the leashes of foreign countries and continue to demolish our country at their orders. This way, Afghanistan has practically become the battlefield of the intelligence services of superpowers and neighboring countries. The threat to our sovereignty and national assets grows with each passing day.

After bringing calamity upon Afghanistan and its people, the US informed the world of the withdrawal of its forces in 2014, and started a widespread propaganda that without the US presence, Afghanistan will sink into crisis and a civil war. With this false propaganda through tens of media channels, the US is manipulating and threatening the public sentiment, and trying to get the puppet Karzai government to sign the strategic pact – which would guarantee the US’s long-term presence – as soon as possible. All the reactionary forces and a group of mercenary intellectuals know that their very existence depends upon this pact and are begging for it to go through, so they can escape our people and the claws of justice under the protective wing of their military master.

A US-led airstrike has killed at least 16 Afghans, including eight women and children, in the eastern province of Kunar, officials say.

According to the provincial governor, 16 people – 12 of them civilians – lost their lives in the strike. Among the victims are four children and four women.

The latest deadly US-led drone attack occurred in the Watapur district of Kunar Province, which lies near the border with Pakistan.

A NATO spokeswoman, however, said that only enemy forces were killed in the operation.

The aerial attack comes one day after at least four people lost their lives in two separate airstrikes by US-led foreign forces in Afghanistan’s central province of Wardak.

Civilian killings at the hands of US-led forces have been a source of tension between Kabul and Washington in recent years. The attacks have also increased anti-American sentiment among Afghans, who hold regular protests to condemn them.

The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 as part of Washington’s so-called war on terror.

The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but insecurity continues to rise across the country, despite the presence of thousands of US-led troops.

The US soldier who massacred 16 Afghan civilians last year in one of the worst atrocities of the Iraq and Afghanistan has been sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, 40, who pleaded guilty in June in a deal to avoid the death penalty, showed no emotion as the verdict was announced at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle.

Bales’ mother, sitting in the front row of the court, bowed her head, rocked in her seat, and wept. An interpreter flashed a thumbs-up sign to a row of Afghan villagers who were either wounded or lost family members in the March 11, 2012 attacks.

Bales never offered an explanation for why he armed himself with a 9 mm pistol and an M-4 rifle and left his post on the killing mission, but he apologized on the witness stand Thursday and described the slaughter as an “act of cowardice, behind a mask of fear, bulls— and bravado.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is demanding the return of nearly 100 Afghan men who are being held in secret, without charges in the country’s UK-run Camp Bastion—a situation with obvious parallels to the United State’s Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility.

“We are living in Afghanistan and we are talking about Afghans detained on Afghan soil and held in Afghanistan. According to our laws this is a breach of sovereignty,” Karzai spokesman Aimal Faizi told the Guardian. “The UK … is another country with its own laws and sovereignty, [which] don’t mean anything here in Afghanistan.”

Their report continues:

This month the defense secretary, Philip Hammond, announced that Kabul and London had agreed safeguards to protect prisoners from torture, and handovers would start after three weeks.

The delay is a requirement to allow for any legal challenges to the decision, and is almost certain to stretch far longer, as lawyers acting for the prisoners have said they will challenge the decision in court.

Using the McChrystal Moment to Raise a Forbidden Question
By David Ray Griffin

Global Research, May 19, 2013
Global Research 25 June 2010

There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be “Obama’s Vietnam.”1 This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.

Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the “lessons of Vietnam”? The US government learned one: If you’re going to fight unpopular wars, don’t have a draft – hire mercenaries!

There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?

This is What Winning Looks Like
A Shocking, Eye-Opening Look At Afghanistan

“All it is now is about getting out and saving face. We’re not leaving because we achieved our goals. We’re leaving because we’ve given up on achieving those goals,” he says. “All the fighting has been to introduce a hated and feared government, who in some areas make the Taliban look like the good guys.”

May 06, 2013 “Information Clearing House” -“RT” – With both the CIA and MI6 secretly providing ‘ghost money’ bribes to the Afghan political establishment, it’s likely that Afghans will increasingly support a resurgent Taliban and the drug trade will be further propped up.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, has recently been criticized for taking ‘ghost money’ from the CIA and MI6. The sums are unknown – for the usual reasons of ‘national security’ – but are estimated to have been in the tens of millions of dollars. While this is nowhere near the eye-bleeding $12 billion shipped over to Iraq on pallets in the wake of the invasion a decade ago, it is still a significant amount.

None of this surprises me. MI6 has a long and ignoble history of trying to buy influence in countries of interest. In 1995/96 it funded a ‘ragtag group of Islamic extremists,’ headed up by a Libyan military intelligence officer, in an illegal attempt to try to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi. The attack went wrong and innocent people were killed. When this scandal was exposed, it caused an outcry.

Yet a mere 15 years later, MI6 and the CIA were back in Libya, providing support to the same ‘rebels,’ who this time succeeded in capturing, torturing and killing Gaddafi, while plunging Libya into apparently endless internecine war. This time around there was little international outcry, as the world’s media portrayed this aggressive interference in a sovereign state as ‘humanitarian relief.’

Recently, we have also seen the Western media making unverified claims that the Syrian regime is using chemical weapons against its own people, and our politicians leaping on these assertions as justification for openly providing weapons to the insurgents.

Other reports are now emerging that indicate it was the rebels themselves who have been using sarin gas against the people. This may halt the rush to war, but not doubt other support will continue to be offered by the West to these war criminals.

So, how is MI6 secretly spending UK taxpayers’ money in Afghanistan? According to Western media reporting, it is being used to prop up warlords and corrupt officials. This is deeply unpopular amongst the Afghan people, leading to the danger of increasing support for a resurgent Taliban.

There is also a significant overlap between the corrupt political establishment and the illegal drug trade, up to and including the president’s late brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. So, another unintentional consequence may be that some of this unaccountable ghost money is propping up the drug trade.

Afghanistan is the world’s leading producer of heroin, and the UN reports that poppy growth has increased dramatically. Indeed, the UN estimates that acreage under poppy growth in Afghanistan has tripled over the last 7 years. The value of the drug trade to the Afghan warlords is now estimated to be in the region of $700 million per year. You can buy a lot of Kalashnikovs with that.

On the one hand, we have Western governments bankrupting themselves to fight the ‘war on terror,’ breaking international laws and murdering millions of innocent people across North Africa, the Middle East and central Asia, while at the same time shredding what remains of our hard-won civil liberties at home.

On the other hand, we apparently have MI6 and the CIA secretly bankrolling the very people in Afghanistan who produce 90 percent of the world’s heroin. And then, of course, more scarce resources can be spent on fighting the failed ‘war on drugs,’ and yet another pretext is used to shred our civil liberties.

This is a lucrative economic model for the burgeoning military-security complex. However, it is a lose-lose scenario for the rest of us.

Annie Machon is a former intel­li­gence officer for MI5, the UK Secur­ity Ser­vice, who resigned in the late 1990s to blow the whistle on the spies’ crimes with her ex-partner, David Shayler.

Edmonds translated terror-related communications for the FBI right after 9/11. In that capacity, she read communications between terrorists and other radicals.

Edmonds said last week that Bin Laden – and his number 2 Al Qaeda lieutenant – Ayman al-Zawahiri – worked with the U.S. government for 3 months after 9/11 to coordinate destablization in the Caucus region:

Click here to read entire article including interview with Sibel discussing the Boston Bombing, the CIA, and the US Empire.

April 309, 2013 “Information Clearing House” -“PTV” – Almost 12 years and many a million deaths later, the US and its NATO allies have made public their plan to start withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014. The war in Afghanistan has been an abject failure, orphaned both on the military and the public relations fronts, with the loss of life, property, and infrastructure being colossal.

More importantly, contrary to initial claims, the global war on terror has not made the world a safer place. Instances of terrorism have continuously been on a rise, engulfing one after another the countries neighboring Afghanistan. Lest we forget, almost all subsequent wars waged by US and NATO have had their genesis in the war that was thrust onto Afghanistan after 9/11.

Much of America’s foreign policy since 9/11 has been based on the assumption that it was attacked by Muslims on that day. This assumption was used, most prominently, to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact every war fought by US and its allies during the first decade of the third millennium has been founded in the post-9/11 doctrine of preemption.

It is now widely agreed that the use of 9/11 as a basis for attacking Iraq was illegitimate: none of the hijackers were Iraqis, there was no working relation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and Iraq was not behind the anthrax attacks. But it is still widely believed that the US attack on Afghanistan was justified. For more than a decade now, the corporate media around the world has consistently been forcing this fantastic narrative as an undisputable fact. It seems likely that the indoctrination will increase to new levels as spin-doctors try to justify the Afghanistan withdrawal plan and prove that the ‘war on terror’ has been a success unmatched in human history.

The stage has been set for a massive ploy of psychological and media war to be unleashed on the unsuspecting minds of the masses. For example, as recently as in 2011, the New York Times while referring to the US attack on Iraq as a “war of choice,” called the battle in Afghanistan a “war of necessity.” Time magazine dubbed it “the right war.” And in 2009, Barack Obama was reported to have said ‘one reason to wind down our involvement in Iraq is to have the troops and resources to “go after the people in Afghanistan who actually attacked us on 9/11.”